Surendra Verma, Development Manager on the Vista Kernel team, digs into Vista's new Transactional File System with Charles Torre. TxF, as it is referred to internally, is a new kernel construct that is part of an updated Vista NTFS. Surendra provides a high level overview of TxF in this video. Elsewhere, Microsoft is serious about meeting its ship date for Windows Vista during the second half of 2006.

I worked earlier in the year on Txf, and am now working on NTFS. Surendra (in the video) is my manager.

There seems to be a little confusion about a couple of points.

NTFS has always been journalled. Journalling is a very small transaction - a rename will either complete or fail, for example, you won't have two links to the same file, or no links, etc. When the volume is mounted, any half-done operations like this will be resolved. That is not new; ext3, zfs, plenty of filesystems do this.

TXF is a whole new kettle of fish. It provides for user-controlled, multiple updates, for longer periods of time. 'tummy' was exactly right with this:
Say:

This is exactly correct. The kernel controls transactions; new applications can participate in the transaction as a Transactional Resource Manager, so that commit() can commit file changes, registry changes, or any 3rd party environment changes. The kernel understands transactions.